For Fans of Nirvana

Brett Morgen's 2015 documentary is not a biography in the conventional sense. It is a collage built from Cobain's own home recordings, journals, animation, and intimate family footage, assembled in a way that mirrors how memory and anxiety actually feel rather than how a Wikipedia summary reads. The animated sequences depicting his childhood are genuinely unsettling precisely because they look like something Cobain himself might have drawn on a slow afternoon. Other rock documentaries interview people who knew the subject; this one tries to inhabit the subject's internal weather. The result is uncomfortable and affecting in equal measure, which is exactly what the best Nirvana songs are.

Cameron Crowe wrote and directed Singles while Nirvana was still rehearsing Nevermind, which means the film captures the moment of transformation without the retrospective mythology. The bands playing fictional shows in the background were the real ones: Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, all before the world reassembled them into a genre called grunge. The romantic plot is slight by design; the movie is fundamentally about a specific urban moment when young people moved to a city and lived cheaply and cared intensely about music. The soundtrack, with its Matt Dillon character fronting a fictional band called Citizen Dick, understands that the humor and the sincerity are not separate things in this culture.

Paul Feig and Judd Apatow set Freaks and Geeks in 1980 and built the show around the discovery of music as the primary means of self-definition for kids who do not fit the available social categories. Lindsay Weir's turn toward the freaks is triggered by a death and a Dead album; Daniel Desario's identity lives entirely in his head-bang and his leather jacket. The show understands that for a certain kind of teenager, a band is not something you listen to but something you belong to. Cobain understood this from the other side of the speaker cabinet, and the best episodes of Freaks and Geeks feel like they were written by someone who had.